Culled from documents collected in German and Allied libraries and from the acts of the Nuremberg trials, comes a story so bizarre that it could also be fiction - the story of Madam Kitty. Even the most imaginative writer would be hard pressed to more graphically illustrate the depths of depravity to which the Nazi mentality led the German people in their power-mad surge toward world domination.

In bringing the story of Madam Kitty to the screen, writer/director Tinto Brass, is not so much telling the story of Kitty and her ladies of pleasure as he is laying bare the monstrous mentality behind the use of Berlin's most popular brothel for spying and blackmail. Like a surgeon whose razor-keen scalpel cuts through the outer attractiveness of breasts and thighs to expose the ugly, cankerous sickness festering underneath, Brass is motivated to do something to illustrate what the sickness of Nazism, facism or racism can do to man. The Madam Kitty situation is emblematic of the lengths to which a totalitarian society must go

to maintain its supremacy.

The need of a totalitarian state to jealously guard its power by, not only the constant policing of subjugated peoples, but by a suspicious vigilance over its own innermost parts, gave rise to an operation likes Madam Kitty. The power to monitor men giving vent to their sexual drives in the anticipation of their letting fall some anti-Nazi sentiment or information, was all a part of the Nazi hierarchy's dehumanizing control of its populace.

"Police and brothel," say Tinto Brass," constitute the main framework of Madam Kitty. The two worlds live together inasmuch as they are instruments of a global experience - that of a totalitarian Nazi power."

Nazism or the Nazi mentality is indeed a permanent part of human society. For those who have been born in the ensuing four decades since Hitler and his gang threatened the world, the rise and fall of the German Nazis are at best, a dim memory or a half-forgotten modern history lesson. The graphic descriptions contained in Madam Kitty should serve not as a stimuli for adolescent prurient interests, but as an involving reminder of what can happen to the world - if we let it.